Nowadays, people are increasingly using the virtual space for daily life activities such as interacting with people, performing a transaction, playing a game, and even living the life of a virtual character in a virtual world for entertainment. Generally, a person uses a virtual entity to perform an activity in the virtual space. Examples of the virtual entities corresponding to the above mentioned activities can be a social profile on an online networking website for interacting with people, a bank account for performing a transaction, a gaming character or a gaming account for online gaming, and a virtual character in the virtual world.
Generally, the virtual entities for performing an activity are unique for each person, for example, every person has a unique social profile for interacting with people and every person has a unique bank account for performing transactions. Therefore, in effect it can be said that the virtual entities are owned by their users. Many a times, a virtual entity also holds monetary value for its owner. The monetary value can be the cost incurred by the owner to obtain the virtual entity, for example the fee paid to open a gaming account on an online gaming website. Also, the monetary value could get enhanced over time. For example, the owner can play a game and earn special powers for the player associated with his/her gaming account thus making it more valuable. However, using the existing frameworks, the virtual entities owned by a person can not be easily traded for their monetary value as a physical object can be.
Many existing systems establish the ownership of the virtual entities by providing access to the virtual entities based on access authorization, for example by using a username/password. Hence, a virtual entity may be traded by selling off the username/password for accessing the virtual entity. However, the sale of a username/password is much more complicated than the sale of a physical object as secrecy and complete transfer of ownership have to be ensured. Also, many times a virtual entity itself can include multiple virtual objects associated with it. For example, a person owns a football team on an online gaming website that includes 11 players, of which one player has the highest ranking on the website. In the real world, another person may be willing to pay a thousand dollars, for example, to buy this player. However, the owner would normally have a single username/password for the whole team and hence would be unable to make the trade for the specific player. Hence, the ownership of the virtual entity and the virtual objects associated with it can not be differentiated thus making trading less flexible. In the above example, even if the owner was somehow able to make the trade, the buyer would have a hard time integrating the player into his existing team. Therefore, presently the user does not have any efficient mechanism to extract the monetary value of his virtual possessions. Further, the existing systems do not support the concept of trading of virtual entities.
In light of the above, there is a need for a method and system that facilitate trading of virtual entities thus enabling an owner of a virtual entity to extract its monetary value in the real world. Further, the method and system should provide differential access to virtual entities as well as their sub-parts to enhance the flexibility in trading.